In 2000 I graduated HS less than an hour from N Tulsa, I also won an Oklahoma history scholarship - I had never heard of this at the time.
The racist way they hide this for all those years is disgusting. In the past couple years they only now have started to even address the unmarked mass grave that’s inside what’s one of two major cities the state even has. A fucking mass grave just sitting blocks away from the downtown mini-skyscrapers. Evil. Just evil.
'Black Wall Street', as it was sometimes referred to, was a thriving community of mostly black people.
The reason it thrived is because a man named O. W. Gurney loaned money to black people to start a business. In that era black people usually couldn't get a loan and were stuck in low paid jobs, stuck in poverty. The businesses thrived and the area flourished. There were hospitals, libraries, hotels, even banks owned by black people.
But the area was very close to a predominantly white area, and tensions grew until they broke. A mob of over 1000 people descended on greenwood, some reportedly armed with machine guns and more than 35 square blocks were destroyed in two days. There are reports that the police and national guard that arrived later to stop the voilence actually perpetrated voilence themselves and arrested black people instead of the attackers.
In the end, more than 1,200 homes were reportedly burned, leaving most of the Greenwood District’s 10,000 residents homeless. Over 6,000 of them were rounded up into internment camps by the local government and forced to live in tents, in some cases for months after the massacre.
An all-white grand jury decided not to charge any white residents in the wake of the violence.
What's amazing is that this wasn't the end of greenwood district. Though it didn't fully recover, it was rebuilt and black business thrived again. Until “urban renewal” plans in the 1960s and ’70s razed much of the Greenwood District to make way for a highway in the 1960s that cut right through the neighborhood.
SnarkySkiBum on March 21st, 2025 at 05:44 UTC »
In 2000 I graduated HS less than an hour from N Tulsa, I also won an Oklahoma history scholarship - I had never heard of this at the time.
The racist way they hide this for all those years is disgusting. In the past couple years they only now have started to even address the unmarked mass grave that’s inside what’s one of two major cities the state even has. A fucking mass grave just sitting blocks away from the downtown mini-skyscrapers. Evil. Just evil.
Chiperoni on March 21st, 2025 at 05:45 UTC »
It wasn't until I watched Watchmen that I even heard about this.
WallabyInTraining on March 21st, 2025 at 07:47 UTC »
'Black Wall Street', as it was sometimes referred to, was a thriving community of mostly black people.
The reason it thrived is because a man named O. W. Gurney loaned money to black people to start a business. In that era black people usually couldn't get a loan and were stuck in low paid jobs, stuck in poverty. The businesses thrived and the area flourished. There were hospitals, libraries, hotels, even banks owned by black people.
But the area was very close to a predominantly white area, and tensions grew until they broke. A mob of over 1000 people descended on greenwood, some reportedly armed with machine guns and more than 35 square blocks were destroyed in two days. There are reports that the police and national guard that arrived later to stop the voilence actually perpetrated voilence themselves and arrested black people instead of the attackers.
In the end, more than 1,200 homes were reportedly burned, leaving most of the Greenwood District’s 10,000 residents homeless. Over 6,000 of them were rounded up into internment camps by the local government and forced to live in tents, in some cases for months after the massacre.
An all-white grand jury decided not to charge any white residents in the wake of the violence.
What's amazing is that this wasn't the end of greenwood district. Though it didn't fully recover, it was rebuilt and black business thrived again. Until “urban renewal” plans in the 1960s and ’70s razed much of the Greenwood District to make way for a highway in the 1960s that cut right through the neighborhood.
That's what killed greenwood.